Updated: 4 days ago
Here I am, seventy-four years old – and female, to boot – and I’m up on my roof squeezing a bit of tar under loose shingles. I check them once a year, before the monsoon season swoops in and blasts us with wind and water. Standard maintenance any homeowner should know to do, but my neighbors think I’m crazy to get up here myself.
Done, I sit on the peak, enjoying the view from my rooftop and musing about life. My cabin’s across the street from the reservation, so it’s nothing but Ponderosa Pines as far as I can see to the west.
I grin, thinking of the view from the farmhouse where I grew up, on the hill overlooking Lake Erie. We’d watch thunderstorms come across the lake from Canada, about fifty miles away. I didn’t need to be on the roof to see that. In fact, I only ever went up on the mudroom roof. It was attached to the house but only one story high. That’s what makes me grin. I’d stand up there with an old fishing pole with a big homemade kite attached to the line, catching the wind that was just enough up there to make that kite soar.
Parents would probably get into trouble letting a kid fly a kite off a roof today, but I wouldn’t swap those times for anything.
My young grandsons have probably never been on a roof. I hope they’ve flown kites. They seem to spend most of their time staring at one screen or another. It’s a touchy subject to address, though. My son would like to get them outdoors doing more, and Lord knows he had his own adventures growing up. I’m pretty sure his older siblings sent him to the roof for an errant Frisbee, then took away the ladder and had him jump into a pile of leaves. I never knew about that until they were grown. Fortunately, the roof wasn’t high and there were a lot of leaves. He didn’t need the emergency room that time.
The mother of his boys isn’t too keen on our stories from his youth. He did tend to go into things head first. I remember the ER doc stitching up his seven-year-old knee, amazed that the kid was arguing with him about the color of the thread instead of crying hysterically. When the doc said so, the kid said, “It’s nothing compared to a golf club to the head.”
That head injury was my first helicopter flight with him, not the last. It’s amazing his brain never suffered permanent damage. The boys’ mother doesn’t understand those stories are a celebration of good luck, resilience, and living life fully.
Dang, the sun is starting to set. I’d best make my way down off this roof before dark.
If you want to listen to this, go to my substack post.
